This section is intended to provide a background to the various embodiments of the invention that are described in this disclosure. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and/or claims of this disclosure and is not admitted to be prior art by the mere inclusion in this section.
Recently, at least the following trends have emerged in field of radio communication. First, mobile broadband traffic has been exploding in radio communication networks such as Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) networks. A technical consequence of this is a corresponding increase of the interference in these networks, or equivalently, an increase of the load. Second, radio communication networks are becoming more heterogeneous, with macro Radio Base Stations (RBS:s) being supported by micro and pico RBS:s at so-called traffic hot spots. Furthermore, home base stations (e.g., femto RBS:s) are emerging in many networks. This puts increasing demands on inter-cell interference management. A consequence of the above is also a relatively large increase of the number of radio network nodes in radio communication networks. An additional consequence is reduced operator control. There is therefore a trend towards introducing more self-organizing network (SON) functionality in radio communication networks. Such functionality may support interference management by automatic interference threshold setting and adaptation, e.g. for a sub-set of the nodes of the cellular network.
It is foreseen that interference may become an increasingly important challenge to deal with in today's and future radio communication networks as the traffic is increasing. This may for example be the case in heterogeneous networks (also known as HetNets).